Well, to say that I was rather disappointed would be an understatement. It’s rather obvious that the developers of the distribution are not system administrators of integrated networked environments otherwise they would not have made such stupid design decisions.

Anyway, here’s the story of my day:

I downloaded the live DVD desktop version initially as I assumed that this would, when installed, effectively replicate a Solaris desktop environment. Seeing as Solaris in this configuration is capable of being a fully functional server as well I assumed that this would be the case for Openindiana.

So, I created a virtual machine under VirtualBox on the Mac, booted the DVD image and started the install. I was surprised about how little interaction there was during the install process as all it asked about was how to partition the disk and to create a root password and a new user. After the install things went down hill.

Now, it seems that the Openindiana bods are trying to ape Linux. When you boot up you get a GDM login screen, but can’t log in as root. So, you log in as the user you created, not too much of a problem, except that you now can’t start any of the configuration applications, they fail silently after you type the root password. You can’t sudo commands as it says that you don’t have permission…

Finally, I managed to get past this roadblock by trying ‘su –‘ which then asked me to change the root password! Once this was done I could actually run the configuration utilities. Not that it got me very much further, as there seems to be no way to set a static IP address out of the box.

I decided to trash that version and download the server version DVD. Maybe that would be better? Surely it would, it’s designed to be a server…

I booted the DVD image and the text installer started, very similar to the old Solaris installer to begin with, except all it asked about again was the disk partitioning, root password/user creation and networking, giving only the options for no networking or automatic network configuration. There was no manual network configuration! What?!!!! This is a server install!

Also missing from the installer was any way of setting up network authentication services or modifying what was installed. The installer had been lobotomised.

Once the OS had installed and booted up there were some more nasty surprises. Again, you couldn’t set a static IP address and any changes to the networking were silently reverted. It was only with some Googling that I managed to hunt down the culprit, the network/physical:nwam service, which is the default configuration. WHY?!!! This is a SERVER not a laptop!

Once this was fixed I managed to at least get a static IP address set up but it’s far more convoluted than with Solaris 10 or before.

Other strangeness in the design… All the X installation is there, except for the X server. Eh? What’s the point of that?

By default the GUI package manager isn’t installed. Once you do, however, it’s set up by default not to see any not installed packages, which is confusing. If you know where to look you can change this but it’s a stupid default.

Getting NFS client stuff working was a challenge as well. When you manually run mount everything seems to work out of the box. NFS filesystems mount fine and everything looks dandy. So, you put some mounts into /etc/vfstab and ‘mount -a‘ works as expected. Reboot, however, and nothing happens! This is due to the fact that most of the NFS client services are not turned on by default but magically work if you run mount. Turning on the nfs/client:default service doesn’t enable the other services it requires, however, but you don’t see this until a reboot. Stupid! It should work the same way at all times. If it works magically on the command line it should work at boot as well and vice versa. Unpredictability on a server is a killer.